Sales Tax Exemptions in eCommerce

Tristany Corgan

How do you handle sales tax exemptions in eCommerce? We are working with Sure Tax to charge sales tax in our store, but we expect a lot of church/nonprofit customers which will need to be sales tax exempt. Blackbaud mentioned there's a setting we can check on someone's record so that they check out without being charged tax, but it sounded like that required them logging in, and I'm not sure we have that capability? I also don't know how many customers will have already interacted with us before for us to add that setting on their record. Is there any other way you guys have handled this?

Jeremy Reynolds

@Tristany Corgan
Everyone constituent is able to log into LO, whether or not they know it or have ever done so before.

Sales tax doesn't come out of the box with LO, see this KB article for details. If you're using sales tax, I presume you're using the software it referenced, or else you'd have need to build it into the price of the product.

If you're doing the “built into the price” method, LO won't know you're attaching taxes (aside from whatever FMV you've applied to each product). If that's the case, you might be able to make discount codes work…you can make them X% to remove it from the price (but that'd also mean you need the folks to know the code).

Tristany Corgan

@Jeremy Reynolds
Yes, we are using the product mentioned in the article. How do constituents go about creating an account/login with us?

Jeremy Reynolds

@Tristany Corgan
Don't know anything about that tax product, unfortunately…you might need to work with them to get into the hows and whats of it specifically. But having it enabled in LO means you should now get tax options when you look at the products in the eCommerce admin. Take a look at the LO help documents for eCommerce, they're pretty comprehensive. Also maybe reach out to your rep, there's training classes you might be able to take advantage of.

As for the accounts, though: if you're in Luminate's administrative area and see the record in Constituent360 > Constituents, then they already have an account and you should see "User Name" in the top-right of their Biographical Information section. You can reset their password there, or else they can visit One More Child's password recovery page (/site/UserLogin?CMD=ForgotPassword).

If they don't have an account yet, then you can direct them to your site's “create an account” page (/site/ConsProfileUser) to make a new one. That said, just making an account won't really tell the system they're exempted…you'd still need to do that stuff in LO's admin. Check out the LO help documents for a better understanding of how groups work.

If you're trying to automate some of this, your best bet is probably to make an LO survey that exempted folks fill out, which will both make them into constituents and can save them into an “tax exemption applications” group automatically. The survey autoresponder could be configured to tell them their username and link to the password page, and inform them they'll get tax status once you've reviewed them.

Again, though, I don't know anything about the tax software, so no idea if it has some of this functionality built in. I'm just speaking from the perspective of what I'd do if I had to somehow figure out that people have a particular status in my LO system.